Andrew Weaver Praises O’Donnell et al 2010

Reader David O emailed me:

I thought you might be interested that today at 11:00am Andrew Weaver was on the Bill Good show on am980 in Vancouver. Much to my amazement Dr. Weaver actually had some kind words to say about you regarding your new Antarctic study. The Interview can be heard here. FF to 27:00 minutes for the relevant part.
[relevant excerpt preserved here]

Weaver said that the article was “rather interesting and turn out to be quite an important study…very statistical…a really nice study. His science will be highly cited, it’s an important study.” (Weaver over-credited me relative to coauthors.)

A small mystery – given that the article hasn’t been published yet and none of the coauthors sent Weaver a copy, I wonder how he got the article.

O’Donnell is an elegant demonstration that a result that reached the cover of a major journal was due to nothing more than the statistical methodologies which were employed. Most academics will be impressed by this.

With a few (admittedly egregious) exceptions, it would be an error to model climate scientists as if they belong to any particular team.

His previous behavior, while arguably partisan and/or paranoid, is probably also Andrew Weaver calling them as he sees them.

Jason I know that “everybody does it” but everybody does it is not an excuse.

snip – please don’t use the word warmist

You say

“…nothing more than the statistical methodologies which were employed.”

but you mean “methods” not “methodologies”. Methodology(the “ology” is a big clue) means “The study of method, especially scientific method”; it is not a clever way of saying method it is a stupid way. Most will view this as “nitpicking”; it isn’t, it is a matter of precision. Precision is very important in science and it includes the use of correct terminology. I think I would get a plethora of agreement on this from El Guapo.

Jason’s usage is correct English (whether it’s an accurate articulation of his thought or not).
From the Merriam-Webster definition of “methodology” :

1 : a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline : a particular procedure or set of procedures
2 : the analysis of the principles or procedures of inquiry in a particular field

“Methodology” is sometimes used merely as a fancy replacement word for “method” or “methods”, but it’s not clear that Jason’s criticism is not intended (given the context of this blog) as part of a general criticism against the statistical techniques currently in common use in climate science.

That’s all fine about his calling them as he sees them. That’s only applicable when he sees something that’s open for him to view. When the study was not published and none of the co-authors sent him a draft of it, how did he ” see ” it in the first place?

Judging from what I saw in the lead up the the O’Donnell article publication as described by Steve and having read Eric Steig’s posts in the comments section of TAV about the paper, I have no doubt that reviewer A was either Steig himself or a crony and they leaked the paper to others in the ” team “. This is the standard way the team operate.

Hey, cut it out, you guys. IIRC, this blog is not for speculation about the motives of people. It is for evidence. It’s not for ad homs, but it’s nice when a lot of effort is rewarded by personal congratulations.

There is an emerging property of blogging, notably that those who follow the development of a blog topic should find the resulting formal publication much more interesting and relevant. The patient blog work that these 4 authors did beforehand was excellent preparation so that when it comes out, the O’Donnell et al paper will be more than just another mathematical dissection for a small specialist audience. Hopefully, it was improved by the comments of bloggers who knew the topic and that improvement might just have made the difference between acceptance and rejection. It might also help readers decide, on the balance, whose paper seems more credible when there are conflicting papers. That is speculation, so mea culpa, but I would second the observation that this paper is breaking new ground by having a collective of bloggers available to help the authors beforehand.

This pattern might well become widespread in future years. It depends in part if editors consider that too much blog disclosure removes the novelty of the main theme of a paper. As for myself, I see it as a coming together of blogging and formalism. This is stronger than each in isolation.

What Geoff Sherrington says. IMHO this site set a standard for staying “above the fray” and hewing to fact and analysis. Lets keep it that way.

…and I am delighted beyond words that O’Donnell et al is finally getting published. I think its going to become an historical “key” paper in Climate Science – quoted and referenced by all papers to follow as an example of How To Do It Right. God knows the authors deserve it.

Bingo! Also, during the course of the radio program, Weaver cited the dreadful PNAS Anderegg “paper” to bolster his more typical ‘don’t listen to those whose views are not climatically correct’.

Not sure when this Greenpeace film was made; but more recently Weaver has taken his advocacy above and beyond his 2007 dive into the pool of hyperbole, to insist that Canada’s Prime Minister “has got to get kicked out” – and he made the ludicrous and offensive suggestion that Canada is like Zimbabwe.

Re: Jeff Id (Dec 7 20:20), This is what I found so amazing. Weaver was chief editor of JoC between 2005-2009. He had Mann and other assorted Team members on his editorial staff. Weaver did Steve Mc no favours when Steve was trying to get to the bottom of Rutherford et al 2005. Also mentioned in a couple of the emails. Weaver frequently parrots Mann in over the top rhetoric. I thought praise from Weaver would be as hard to come by as praise from Mann himself.

Re: Richard Drake (Dec 8 03:59), Careful with sotiries abotu Dr. Weaver. He has complained on many occasions that he gets misquoted. He has also launched suit against the National Post here in Canada for misquotes etc. See here.

Re: Richard Drake (Dec 8 03:59), I’m somewhat familiar with Weaver since he lives in my backyard. He’s generally regarded as Canada’s top climate modeler. He was LA in TAR, AR4 and I think SAR as well. He has also been selected as LA for AR5:Chapter 12. He gets lots of local press and usually offers up scary “point of no return” scenarios like this. A search at Fred Singer’s site will give you some old links. Rutherford et al 2005 (Mann, Jones, Bradley, Hughes, Briffa etc.) was published in JoC and there was a whole series of posts at CA back in 2006. I think this might have been the first one but not sure. My recollection is that Steve got the usual runaround trying to get data. For relevant UEA emails see here, here and here.

Thank you for such a thorough answer. From ‘fraud’ and ‘bozo’ to author of ‘very nice study’. Who’d have thought it?

So Weaver is a climate modeler. His attitude on Monday is surely the one climate science should always have taken to valid criticisms of Mannian reconstruction. They have always been peripheral to the main CAGW argument, which stands or falls on strong positive feedbacks from water vapour and clouds. So why the problem?

It’s quite a puzzle, including Weaver’s prescience. But it can’t be bad news.

To me Climate Audit has resulted in a fundamental shift in the process of scientific discovery, documentation, and verification. Fundamentally, your presentation of your research and the back and forth between yourself, interested parties who are knowledgeable in the software, science, and the larger realm of society, is resulting in a return to the best of peer review, which is true critical analysis of findings.

If this paper is as solid as it seems (and I have watched the development of the thoughts and process here on CA) and has the influence that it has the potential to have, it will act as a means whereby the “mainstream” science community opens up and the scientists allow their work to go through the CA process before publication. This “public” peer review should help to improve the process overall and will result in a better science product.

The next evolution in this process is for the scientific world to regularize, and codify this improved process, which includes the publishing and archival for public access of raw science data, software code, interim results, and the process of scientific thought evolution. The peer review system as it exists today should evolve in this direction, and this is a good thing.

It is my opinion that this is your legacy, and your best contribution to science.

Re: Dennis Wingo (Dec 7 22:29),
Part of what you are describing is implemented in the form of a growing movement called Reproducible Research… standardized in some labs of some universities around the world.

However, re: ” . . . whereby the “mainstream” science community opens up and the scientists allow their work to go through the CA process before publication.”

Mosh has been suggesting they do this for years on CA and repeats it in a post above.

I think the Team requires complete freedom to publish as they see fit and will not consent to allow CA to exert influence on the narrative since experience tells them it will likely derail the train. That may change should they fall further into disrepute.

That said, I don’t know if Weaver is a starter on the Team but if he is, his statements in this interview suggest that Team recalcitrance may currently be undergoing “peer review.”

Weaver not only praised the work, he also incorrectly/prematurely stated that it was “recently published” – which means he had priveleged access not only to the material, but also to the editorial process. Postulating that Weaver was a reviewer does not solve that second mystery. He clearly was supplied with priveleged information. He was not just a reviewer. How else could he know the fate of the article? Reviewers don’t know what an Editor will decide.

Read the thread. Weaver had priveleged insight as to the status of the paper. Therefore he had an informant. That gives part of the answer to Steve’s question in the opening post: how did he have knowledge of the submission?

The acceptance of the paper and the details of what was done in the paper were discussed on this blog and elsewhere days before that radio interview ever took place. I know playing internet detective is fun, but this is just silly.

It’s logical to suppose my reasoning “silly” if you take “acceptance” and “publication” as synonymous. They’re not and Weaver knows that.

Either you agree that Weaver had an inside track on the content of the paper, or you agree that his commentary was based solely on second-hand information, possibly nothing more than the superficial parsing here at CA. You choose.

Steve asked a question, inviting us to play sleuth. If that’s what you think is silly, then I would take it up with him.

But I would argue to the contrary. The issue is how well-connected, behind-the-scenes, Weaver is to the team.

But if, as Jeff Id said, Weaver is emeritus editor of the journal, maybe the current editor asked him to look over the paper and give his advice on whether it should be published? That would seem to be a reasonable (or at least a defensible) thing for the current editor to do when faced with a controversial paper, and it doesn’t involve any leaking by the reviewers.

But why don’t the spelling police here make some substantive commentary? Why so anxious to paint us as “crazy”? Have the errors of Steig and the Team got you down? Boo hoo.

Time, I think, to audit the rest of Steig’s lifetime of work. Maybe it’s ALL junk science. Like most Team work. If the data don’t say what you want them to say, then infill, PCA and retain only the part you like and call it “signal”, the “smoking gun”. Pure junk.

Maybe many on the team tried to find the penalty box. I said on TAV, “In addition to the possibility of reviewer bias,I get another impression from these two papers.
The Steig et al 2009 paper suggests that the peer reviewers and the writers did not know enough about the statistics used while the writers of O’Donnell et al 2010 knew more that most of the reviewers. This is where peer review falters and blog review stands out.”

On the broad topic of establishment figures admitting “outsiders”, here is an unanswered email I sent to the President of the Australian Academy of Sciences. Suggestions on how to get an answer would be appreciated because like the AGU, the AAS has issued a blanket statement of support for the establishment.
……………………
Copy from 8 Sept 2010:

Having worked with several of the above named authors and spent many hours/days of discussion with some, it is evident that the growth of important new scientific concepts often divides into a mainstream camp and a minority camp.

Here, I am asking are whether the AAS recognises this not uncommon pattern of progress; and notes that the minority view can evolve to the more accepted view.

For example, does the AAS have a set of guidelines to assist emerging talented scientists to manage the minority view?

An answer framed around “man-made climate change” would illuminate the Academy’s stance and indicate how it has learned from past experience. I could name several test examples on request.

David O, I don’t understand your comment. I can see you have linked something that contains an abstract of Dessler’s paper (poster), but that is not the same as the paper. But then again, I’m lost. I didn’t know there was a mystery about Spencer and Dessler’s paper. Did Spencer comment about Dessler’s paper before it was published? Did the comment show he knew more detail than was in the abstract? Does it really matter?

Re: Ron Cram (Dec 10 10:29),
Sorry, I should have explained myself better. I let my lack of patience for Eli get the better of me. I interpreted Eli’s comment to suggest that Spencer got Dessler’s paper through some back-door non protocol channel so if Spencer can do it why can’t Weaver. Dessler first presented his paper at the A-Train Symposium in New Orleans in October where it was open for discussion. So no parallel between how Spencer got a copy of Dessler’s paper and how Weaver (possibly) got a copy of O’Donnell et al 2010.

Is it funny or sad, the way Eli et al waltz in here making these tangential proclamations without commenting on the science of the paper in question? Eli, this is your chosen method of winning over hearts and minds? How’s that working for you?

An aggressive style does not foreclose the possibility of intellectual admiration for an accomplishment of someone(s) you’ve been on the other side of different issues.

But the combination can be disconcerting to both friends and foes.🙂

If the Team were not so utterly tone-deaf to the many statements that Steve has made over the years, they would try to get him to co-author far more often. Not always, of course, but there would be plenty of mutually interesting opportunities to do so without serious concern about a bloodbath amongst the authors.

In the news article “Canadian scientist says UN’s global warming panel ‘crossing the line’”, published in Canwest papers in January 2010, he said that almost all the “science” is correct but the IPCC should stick to neutral science instead of advocacy. He does logically criticize the IPCC for sucking in resources to create huge reports in a short time, when those resources should be spent on longer-term research. I have much sympathy for that position per se. Note that Weaver is one of the prominent authors of IPCC reports, and does advocacy himself as in http://www.timescolonist.com/technology/Jack+Knox+column+hard+climate+scientist+when+dinosaurs+making+calls/3846005/story.html#comments.

Weaver was a key author in the pre-Copenhagen document “Copenhagen Diagnosis”, a glossy document complete with gratuitous use of images such as polar bears, a use with no conceivable purpose other than to play on emotions.

In the Martlet newspaper article “Expert enters climate summit cynically” he is quoted as saying that:
– the Canadian federal government is alleged to have conspired with Alberta and the Canadian Association of petroleum Producers
– voting down of a climate change bill by the Canadian Senate was an “affront to democracy”
– refers to opponents as “dinosaurs”
– he is critical of events like Copenhagen because they don’t do nearly enough to prevent several degrees of warming

So maybe there is a streak of a desire for quality buried in Weaver, but from the modest amount of rhetoric I’ve seen he does not exhibit quality of communication and scientific precision in his public words and behaviour, and he clearly believes what the outcome of research will be. I side with Tim Ball who said of Weaver and Hansen “Their remarks are intended to scare people by threatening impending doom – nothing new – except there is increasing urgency and fear because their message is failing.” (in http://www.fcpp.org/publication.php/2707 Bogeymen of the CO2). Certainly Weaver is not of the thoughtful well-expressed caliber of Stephen McIntyre.

Note in the interview that Weaver depends on publication in journals, so rejects Tim Ball who he claims he has never read a paper of in Weaver’s field (that statement bears checking), but thanks to the leak from the CRU we know those have been heavily controlled by alarmists. Weaver himself has been accused of suppressing questions at conferences.

Tim Ball makes a lot of sense.

Note that in his reference in the interview to McIntyre et al paper Weaver says it does not change the [indistinguishable word] paradigm.

On January 10, 2011, Canada Free Press began publishing on this website an article by Dr. Tim Ball entitled “Corruption of Climate Change Has Created 30 Lost Years” which contained untrue and disparaging statements about Dr. Andrew Weaver, who is a professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

Contrary to what was stated in Dr. Ball’s article, Dr. Weaver: (1) never announced he will not participate in the next IPCC; (2) never said that the IPCC chairman should resign; (3) never called for the IPCC’s approach to science to be overhauled; and (4) did not begin withdrawing from the IPCC in January 2010.

As a result of a nomination process that began in January, 2010, Dr. Weaver became a Lead Author for Chapter 12: “Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility” of the Working Group I contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC.” That work began in May, 2010. Dr. Ball’s article failed to mention these facts although they are publicly-available.

Dr. Tim Ball also wrongly suggested that Dr. Weaver tried to interfere with his presentation at the University of Victoria by having his students deter people from attending and heckling him during the talk. CFP accepts without reservation there is no basis for such allegations.

CFP also wishes to dissociate itself from any suggestion that Dr. Weaver “knows very little about climate science.” We entirely accept that he has a well-deserved international reputation as a climate scientist and that Dr. Ball’s attack on his credentials is unjustified.

CFP sincerely apologizes to Dr. Weaver and expresses regret for the embarrassment and distress caused by the unfounded allegations in the article by Dr. Ball.